Linux geekery, etc.

Work shifted from Ubuntu 9.10 as our development platform to FC12. I've been limping along with an Ubuntu machine locally and access to FC12 servers at work. But I really did need to upgrade. My personal machine needs an upgrade too. I've been running Mandrake 10.0 for a long time (2004?), and its hard drives need to be replaced.

The original plan:

1. Put new hard drives into personal machine and install fresh OS onto them, then copy hard home directories from old hard drive.

That didn't work, my motherboard only has two SATA connectors. Also Best Buy is useless at selling me either a reasonably priced external enclosure, or any sort of controller card at all.

3a. Only mildly painful. root can't get an X login, but can get text virtual terminal. Gnome settings in Ubuntu-derived home directory do not blow up too badly.

4a. Why is SELinux preventing vpnc from overwriting /etc/resolv.conf? What is the other access that it's already complained about 222 times since boot? Turn off SELinux rather than attempt to understand configuration files.

4b. Attempt to follow internal documentation for setting up build tools. Regret not being able to run kickstart remotely.

4d. Re-run installation script. It's missing some dependencies but it's not fail-stop. Install bison and flex. Where is yacc? Package now helpfully labelled byacc. Very much miss Ubuntu feature that suggests package to install; FC12 version pops up something in the toolbar that churns for a while but doesn't seem to actually make a suggestion.

4e. Build progresses further. But now the wrong version of a library is being used. Fortunately I ran into this exact problem earlier in the weekend and recognize the symptoms.

Time for bed. Very discouraged that update I actually *want* to do is now delayed until next weekend, probably.